•  195
    Personal Sovereignty and Our Moral Rights to Non‐Interference
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 33 (1): 621-634. 2016.
    In this article, I defend the inviolability approach to solving the paradox of deontology against a criticism raised by Michael Otsuka. The paradox of deontology revolves around the question whether it should always be permissible to infringe someone's right to non-interference when this would serve to minimize the overall number of comparable rights infringements that occur. According to the inviolability approach, rights to non-interference protect and give expression to our personal sovereign…Read more
  •  83
    This thesis takes up a rights-based perspective to discuss a number of issues related to the problem of permissible harm. It appeals to a person’s capacity to shape her life in accordance with her own ideas of the good to explain why her death can be bad for her, and why each of us should have primary say over what may be done to her. The thesis begins with an investigation of the badness of death for the person who dies. If death is bad for us, this helps explain the wrongness of killing. The t…Read more
  •  68
    The option value of life
    Economics and Philosophy 37 (1): 118-138. 2021.
    This paper argues that under conditions of uncertainty, there is frequently a positive option value to staying alive when compared to the alternative of dying right away. This value can make it prudentially rational for you to stay alive even if it appears highly unlikely that you have a bright future ahead of you. Drawing on the real options approach to investment analysis, the paper explores the conditions under which there is a positive option value to staying alive, and it draws out importan…Read more
  •  68
    Morally Permissible Risk Imposition and Liability to Defensive Harm
    Law and Philosophy 39 (4): 381-408. 2020.
    This paper examines whether an agent becomes liable to defensive harm by engaging in a morally permissible but foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustified harm. It first clarifies the notion of a foreseeably risk-imposing activity by proposing that an activity should count as foreseeably risk-imposing if an agent may morally permissibly perform it only if she abides by certain duties of care. Those who argue that engaging in such an activity can render …Read more
  •  63
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  58
    Defensive Liability: A Matter of Rights Enforcement, not Distributive Justice
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (3): 539-553. 2022.
    The Moral Responsibility Account of Liability to Defensive Harm (MRA) states that an agent becomes liable to defensive harm if, and only if, she engages in a foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustified harm. Advocates of the account contend that liability to defensive harm is best understood as an aspect of distributive justice. Individuals who are liable to some harm are not wronged if the harm is imposed on them, and liability to defensive harm thus h…Read more
  •  58
    The toss-up between a profiting, innocent threat and his victim
    Journal of Political Philosophy 23 (2): 146-165. 2015.
    Imagine that, through no fault of your own, you nd yourself at the bottom of a deep well. Thugs have picked up an innocent person | call him Bob | and have thrown him down the well. Bob is now falling towards you. If you do nothing, your body will cushion Bob's otherwise lethal fall. This will guarantee his survival, but it will kill you. If you shoot your ray gun, you vaporize and kill Bob, thereby saving your life. Are you morally permitted to shoot your ray gun?Most people believe that self-d…Read more
  •  50
    We frequently engage in activities that impose a risk of serious harm on innocent others in order to realise trivial benefits for ourselves or third parties. Many moral theories tie the evidence-relative permissibility of engaging in such activities to the size of the risk that an individual agent imposes. I argue that we should move away from such a reliance on quantified individual risks when conceptualising morally permissible risk imposition. Under most circumstances of interest, a conscient…Read more
  •  44
    Almost Over: Aging, Dying, Dead, by F. M. Kamm (review)
    Mind 133 (529): 242-250. 2024.
  •  44
    Civilian Immunity Without the Doctrine of Double Effect
    with Yitzhak Benbaji
    Utilitas 32 (1): 50-69. 2020.
    Civilian Immunity (‘Immunity’) is the legal and moral protection that civilians enjoy against the effects of hostilities under the laws of armed conflict and according to the ethics of killing in war. Immunity specifies different permissibility conditions fordirectly targeting civilianson the one hand, and forharming civilians incidentallyon the other hand. Immunity is standardly defended by appeal to the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE). We show that Immunity's prohibitive stance towards targeti…Read more
  •  41
  •  39
    In _War by Agreement_ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), Yitzhak Benbaji and Daniel Statman argue that the ‘war convention’ – i.e. the international laws and conventions that are widely accepted to govern the use of force between sovereign states – represents a morally binding contract. On their understanding, the war convention replaces a pre-contractual morality governed by principles that so-called reductive individualists have identified and argued for over the past twenty…Read more
  •  36
    Susanne Burri explores some of the moral complexities of the WWII bombings.
  •  35
    What Do Business Executives Think About Distributive Justice?
    with Daniela Lup and Alexander Pepper
    Journal of Business Ethics 174 (1): 15-33. 2020.
    While there exist extensive literatures on both distributive justice and senior executive pay, and a number of authors (notably the French economist Thomas Piketty) have addressed the implications of high pay for distributive justice, the existing literature fails to address what senior executives themselves think about distributive justice and whether they consider high income inequalities to be morally acceptable. We address this gap by analysing a unique dataset comprising the views of over 1…Read more
  •  34
    Pazifismus und Selbstbestimmung: Kommentar zu Pazifismus. Eine Verteidigung
    Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 77 (2): 204-209. 2023.
  •  31
    How (Not) to Fear Death
    Public Affairs Quarterly 38 (1): 45-61. 2024.
    Through the ages, many thinkers have worried that our death fears mar our lives. Sharing this worry, the Epicureans have argued that we can live well only if we see death for what it is: a mere “nothing” that it is ill-fitting to fear. I show how this argument depends on the assumption that a mental state theory of well-being is correct. If we give up this assumption, it can be fitting to fear death. Using my philosophical discussion of when and how it is fitting to fear death, I formulate three…Read more
  •  11
    Was niemanden angeht
    In Emmanuel Alloa, Michael G. Festl, Federica Gregoratto & Thomas Telios (eds.), Quertreiber des Denkens: Dieter Thomä - Werk und Wirken, Transcript Verlag. pp. 67-78. 2019.